On the evening of February 1st, BNB Chain released the BNB Greenfield white paper. This is the third chain in the BNB ecosystem after BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Chain.
For developers and users, the most interesting thing about this chain is that it has both storage and computing capabilities.
As far as developers are concerned, the native storage function frees dApps that require data storage from developing on two sets of infrastructure. It is also more convenient for users who need to use the storage function. Since the storage and calculation are based on the same account, the user's data sovereignty can be clarified.
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What is BNB Greenfield?
What are the cornerstones of a decentralized internet world? Assets, compute, storage.
Various emerging encrypted assets have emerged continuously since the birth of Bitcoin, providing a carrier for value transfer in the decentralized world. The increasingly powerful public chains provide the necessary computing power for the decentralized world.
When Turing's complete Ethereum brought smart contracts to the encrypted world, smart contracts became an indispensable part of the encrypted world. Smart contracts with computing power have brought programmability and composability to the encrypted world, which also laid the foundation for the prosperity of DeFi and NFT.
However, if we want to bring complete decentralized services to users and eventually transition our Internet world to a completely decentralized one, I am afraid that there is still an important link missing in the chain-storage.
Although the existing decentralized storage solutions can solve many problems, such as data privacy protection, anti-censorship, etc., the current decentralized system is still not mature enough.
In this context, BNB Greenfield, as a decentralized data storage system with Web3 application smart contract integration, aims to revolutionize the data ownership economy and bring new standards of utility to Web3.
In terms of specific functions,BNB Greenfield will be the distributed storage infrastructure of BNB Chain.Using BNB Greenfield, anyone who has a BNB Chain address and holds BNB can use DropBox to seamlessly store data and deploy websites on BNB Greenfield.
BNB Greenfield uses an API interface similar to AWS S3, and users can programmatically manipulate their data, as well as store historical data of the BNB smart chain and infrastructure data of other BNB ecosystems. Unlike most decentralized storages that emphasize close integration with the encrypted world, BNB Greenfield took into account the huge Web2 world at the beginning of its design. In addition to adopting more mainstream APIs, its storage services will also be priced in US dollars, but Payments will still be made in BNB.
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From 1 to 100, what are the problems of distributed storage?
In order to solve the storage problem, the encryption world has been actively exploring solutions. Decentralized storage can be said to be a topic with a long history.
From the early IPFS, Filecoin, Swarm, to Arweave, which has risen in this round of bull market, the demand for storing data on the chain has basically been met. But the progress from 0 to 1 does not mean that the infrastructure in this sector is "easy to use" enough.
In the early days of decentralized storage (you could even call it the "prehistoric era"), the Ethereum network was used for distributed storage. Although Ethereum cannot be used to store files, "data" can be written to Ethereum in one transaction. Therefore, many enthusiasts have converted pictures into base 64 strings for storage on Ethereum. However, when it comes to large amounts of data storage, Ethereum just doesn't fit the bill. Also, deploying larger data to the mainnet will be very expensive due to gas fees.
For this reason, a batch of decentralized storage networks were born.
Take IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) as an example, this protocol has been launched as early as 2015. The development team mainly benchmarks it against the HTTP protocol of the Internet, aiming to supplement or even replace it. Its vision is very ambitious and extremely versatile. But the disadvantage of this infrastructure is that this network is too decentralized, and the peer-to-peer mechanism makes it difficult for files stored in IPFS to be permanently stored. And the economic system has not been cleverly introduced, making it lack of incentives.
The incentive mechanism based on the IPFS protocol and the public chain system Filecoin have changed to a certain extent. It serves as both the storage layer of IPFS and the incentive layer of the IPFS protocol, and IPFS is the application layer of the entire system. Both Filecoin and IPFS are developed by Protocol Labs, and the two protocols share multiple functional modules.
However, Filecoin mining hardware requirements are high, and there is too much junk data on the network. Its performance and download speed are also a big shackle affecting its development. The obsolescence of the project also caused some deviations between many product concepts and the existing situation, and lost the traffic and attention of the past.
In 2018, Arweave went live. Arweave, which has risen in the latest round of bull market, has ushered in the "new king" of the storage sector that has been silent for a long time. The purpose of Arweave is to store data reliably for a long time, providing a storage solution called Permaweb permanent network. Instead of a blockchain structure, the network uses blockweave. On this network, users can pay a one-time payment and obtain a permanent file storage agreement to realize true permanent data storage for the first time.
In the landing scene, the characteristics of Arweave make its scope of application narrower, and it is more used to store art resources that are used statically, such as some dApp pictures, NFT pictures, etc.
Taking a comprehensive look at the entire decentralized storage track, applicable scenarios and ecological applications are the common limitations of almost all storage networks. At present, decentralized storage is more used to store some "art resources" (such as NFT small pictures) that are not highly coupled. Computing and decentralized storage in many Web3 projects are not necessarily connected.
If the dApp needs to read and write frequently on the storage network, developers must develop cross-chain on the two networks (the chain where the smart contract is located and the chain where the storage is located). What affects the experience even more is that the user himself cannot use the ID of a chain to control the data of two different networks at the same time.
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The imagination space of "storage + computing"
Based on the most basic characteristics of the blockchain, users can have autonomy over tokens through their accounts. And when the use case expands to a larger scope of use, some problems arise. For example, for users, they cannot prove their sovereignty over data on another network (storage network) only through the ID of one network.
Smart contracts are not a new thing, but in the existing decentralized network, whether it is the mainstream public chain, the new public chain, or L2, it only brings better "computing power". Although it can be connected to other storage networks, this non-native cross-network development always brings some troubles and unfriendly user experience to developers.
If smart contracts and decentralized storage can be natively integrated from the beginning and cooperate with the existing huge dApp ecosystem, it will be a milestone event for Web3.
After the release of BNB Greenfield, this chain gives developers the ability to simultaneously store and compute on the same chain. This capability can enable many on-chain and off-chain applications.
In BNB Greenfield, users can create, read, share and even execute data, and its user experience and cost will be close to the currently popular Web2 cloud storage services. Users can fully own their own data assets and decide who can use the data and how to use it. Users' data assets can be conveniently placed in a broad, smart contract-based economic environment to gain financial value.
Victor Genin, senior solution architect of BNB Chain, believes, "2021 is the year of breakthroughs in DeFi. In 2022, the decentralization of NFT and digital ownership will rise. And in 2023, through BNB Greenfield, BNB Chain will Create a new theme for data ownership and utility. BNB Greenfield will bring utility and financialization opportunities to data in storage and programmability to data ownership.”
The native integration of BNB Greenfield and BNB Smart Chain brings a wealth of imagination for future applications.By allowing smart contracts to interact with users' own data assets, both ownership and read permissions can be financially managed by the EOA wallet on the BNB smart chain through NFT. EOA can not only manage NFTs on behalf of data, but also manage data itself. The native cross-chain protocol can further promote the concept of "data ownership" in Web3, such as:
1. Authors can digitally publish and sell works directly on the BNB smart chain through smart contracts;
2. Data creators can upload and exchange their products in smart contracts and combine them with other DeFi;
3. Decentralized social media can be built on top of BNB Greenfield. Users can own their own data on BNB Greenfield and store their own social data in a decentralized manner, while different social media front-ends facilitate users to build social networks. And based on this deduction, just by benchmarking Web2, we can find a variety of potential use cases such as decentralized Twitter, Tik Tok, and FaceBook.
4. Decentralized subscription system. Save content through decentralized storage, and restrict permissions through native smart contracts, so that a large number of potential use cases such as paid blogs and member access control can be derived.
The unification of storage and computing makes development easier for developers and unlocks many functions that were previously impossible or difficult to achieve. Based on this, more scenarios have fully decentralized solutions.
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The new public chain enhances the value capture capability of BNB
Just like BNB Beacon Chain and BNB Chain, BNB Greenfield will also be backed by BNB. And this is already the third chain supported by BNB. The launch of BNB Greenfield will broaden the usage scenarios of BNB again, and the native storage function will also bring more application value to BNB.
In February 2022, after the reintegration of BNB Chain, its structure can be compared to Ethereum. The BNB Beacon chain (formerly Binance Chain) provides a secure technical underlying layer, and BNB Chain (formerly Binance Smart Chain) has actually become the execution layer. . In its ecology, Dapp covers multiple sectors, including DeFi, NFT, GameFi, Metaverse, cross-chain, derivatives, infrastructure, etc., covering almost all areas of the chain world.
But in the coming Web3 era, an important sector is still not covered by BNB, which is the "storage" function launched this time. When Web3 is adopted on a large scale, the storage of a large amount of important data cannot be safely handed over to centralized services. It can be said that BNB Greenfield is an important part of the BNB territory.
Before Greenfield, BNB already had multiple attributes. The introduction of the storage network this time can better see Binance BNB Chain's ambition to bet on the large-scale adoption of Web3. Upgrading from a single chain to a multi-chain, improving throughput, this is a more independent and complete Layer 1 decentralized network ecology. As the scope of use cases expands, BNB will also benefit from the growth dividend brought about by ecological development, capturing value across CeFi and DeFi.
